Why?

Preservation – Memory – Research – Understanding

Why would anyone care about preserving dance stories? Well, I surely know I care about it, and I am certain there are many more dance enthusiasts in the world interested in hearing these accounts.

I find nothing more captivating than listening to stories of how things used to be, way before my time. Sadly enough – not many people thought of dance being important enough to actually document it, or there were merely no means to do so properly. How interesting would it be though to know what dancing was like 100, 300, or even 1000 years ago?

For many of my research projects in the past I have been confronted with a scarcity of material to work with and draw information from.  We all sit on more information than we think we do, and I aim to catalogue the material on dances in Ireland I have so far been collecting to make it available for future researchers and interested people. This is a work in progress which will be stored in my personal collection at the National Dance Archives of Ireland.

On a further step, I aim to collect and preserve personal dance stories for our descendants, to give them an insight of what dance was like when we experienced it in any form, to provide them with information we were barely provided with by our own ancestors, and to offer a link for them so they can understand their heritage and where they come from.